We hired a new, senior sales rep at FirstRain this week. Very seasoned guy, has worked for our VP sales before, and I asked him to tell me why he joined.
I am always curious what motivates people to join us — how good a job do we do of sharing what’s in our crazy minds about what we’re trying to build when we interview people — and I like to capture it before they get mired into the daily challenges of growing a new company (which are considerable, especially if you are in sales).
Thomas sent me his list:
* FirstRain provides sales people competitive advantage (better info faster)
* Excellent leadership team and longstanding relationships
* Game changing vision
* Fantastic people and culture
* Significant market opportunity
Clearly he is not a loquacious guy. A year from now I’ll buy him a beer and ask “So… was it what you expected?”
We have yet another customer win this morning – Dun & Bradstreet.
On the heels of last weeks announcement of our partnership with Fidelity, today we’re announcing that we have been selected by D&B to provide business content from the web in their DNBi Risk Management Platform.The contract is for the research engine to provide a continually updated stream of high quality business content for top companies within the D&B platform.
The goal for D&B is to get richer information to their corporate clients who are looking into credit worthiness – basically risk management. Adding in high quality business content from the web fills out the picture for them very efficiently.
D&B chose us because of quality which is very validating for our R&D team who have worked so hard to get the technology to transform messy, duplicative web content into a high quality data source. Only firms who have tried to do this know just how hard it is. We filter and categorize on companies and business topics producing a dynamic, continuously updated content stream.
So, adding D&B to our other platform partners like Capital IQ, Mergent and Fidelity is very exciting.
Here is our press release from this morning.
Another exciting morning today!
This morning Fidelity has announced that it has selected FirstRain as a partner on its new Stock Research Center on Fidelity.com which they launched last week and are announcing today.
You can see FirstRain’s spike and volume detection technology at work for yourself if you go here – look for this section on the right hand side and have fun!
Our research engine is continuously identifying and highlighting trending economic and industry content from the web and then identifying which companies being impacted by these trends.So then, once a user gets interested in an idea the UI takes him/her straight to the Fidelity fundamental research about the company to help them decide whether to trade on the idea.
The smarts we’re putting to work here are the system’s ability to detect spikes and directionality in any one of the thousands of business topics we have built into FirstRain. The topics are all associated with industries so we can quickly pick out what’s hot in any one area like Technology or Energy. We are continuously processing millions of documents and storing the patterns – and so can distinguish quickly when a spike is occurring in contrast to the normal levels of content about any particular topic.
We are obviously delighted with this partnership.It’s exciting for us to leverage our research engine and contribute to Fidelity’s revised research platform.
Guest post: Marty Betz, VP Technology
Today, YY and I attended ReadWriteWeb’s Real-Time Web Summit. It was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, hosted by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb.com.
Like many conferences recently, they’d adopted a structure based on an open, spontaneous agenda which gets filled in by the participants during the first hour. It turns the meeting into a focused networking event that fosters exchange of technical questions and information between the attendees, and minimizes the time spent having one person speak at a large audience. This worked surprisingly well. It seems this is a natural evolution of conferences. Now that much of the information that was once delivered from a lectern can now be found online, meeting new people and discussing specific problems is where unique value is found. I’m always impressed by how many attendees are willing to put themselves out there and deliver a semi-impromptu presentation, or run a discussion.
The talks ranged widely, from protocols underlying real-time communication, to human factors associated with information processing, to data extraction and natural language filtering techniques. Of course, there was also a good share of “how do we monetize this” chitchat.
My initial observations are that, even though the crowd was self-selected for real-time web interest, there was healthy cynicism about it’s value. One talk was even titled “Why do you hate real-time…” On the other hand, there was a palpable sense that something important will emerge out of the web’s new, faster and denser information flows; we just can’t predict what it is yet.
The host, Marshall, started by proposing a spectrum on which ideas were organized based on whether they focused on person-person communication, person-machine communication, machine-to-person, etc.
Every hour had several different talks to choose from. I first dropped in on a talk about the service PubSubHubbub from Google, and then another about linguistic techniques for filtering twitter feeds. My next hour included discussion of structured information and tools for collecting and deriving structured entity relationships.
YY ran a great session on how to make use of the way the web changes, over the course of the day — and longer time periods. It raised questions about how can you distinguish the significant change patterns from the incidental ones? It evolved into discussions of when and how long “old” information remains valuable, and it gives valuable context to recent data. Others in the group talked about filtering highly noisy sources, the practical requirements and limits of human attention, questions of push vs. pull information delivery, and the frequency with which people can really ingest and make use of content streams.
I finished the conference attending two light afternoon talks. The first was on the importance of “emotion” in the value we attach to real-time content. There was animated conversation about how data you get from another specific individual can come with the baggage and the benefits of your immediate relationship and that person’s mood. Finally, I enjoyed a round table discussion of how soon “augmented reality” will become a reality.
Overall, I thought the conference was a great experience. As usual, the web continues to change year after year, and new problems arise, raising new opportunities. I am confident that the increase in real time data will, like other changes in the past, inspire FirstRain to find unique loads of derived value in the web.
Exciting news for us this morning. We are announcing that Mergent has partnered with us as the source of business news into their Mergent Online information platform. Mergent provides a very rich information platform used by libraries, corporate and government functions and academic institutions and approached us to improve the quality of the business news they were providing their customers.
Our data feed version works well in a case like this. Our customer tells us the type of content they want – what companies and what topics the content should be categorized against – and we produce a high quality feed of links to the appropriate web documents which we continually update. This is a similar approach to the way we provide content to our partner Capital IQ and to other customers (who wish to remain nameless).
Obviously we are delighted with this partnership – and I admire management teams who have the vision and the courage to buy their company (as the Mergent team did when they bought it out from Xinhua Finance last year) so I am very pleased to be able to support them.
Here is the press release from this morning.
FIRSTRAIN PARTNERS WITH MERGENT TO DELIVER STREAMLINED WEB CONTENT THROUGH MERGENT ONLINE
Search-Driven Research Provides a Broader Perspective of Web Coverage
San Mateo, Calif., September 14, 2009 – FirstRain® today announced it has partnered with Mergent, Inc., to deliver unique web content through their market-leading Mergent Online platform. The FirstRain research engine will provide a continually updated data stream of high quality web results that will allow Mergent Online clients to quickly and efficiently discover web information that is essential to their research. This partnership represents an expanded data set of web sources, to include not only mainstream sources, but also differentiated and targeted content—such as industry journals and blogs.
FirstRain is the leader in identifying, extracting and analyzing qualitative information from the web on companies, business topics and markets for professional business users. The research engine technology allows users to be confident in the precision, relevancy and cleanliness of the content that is retrieved. FirstRain’s proprietary algorithms identify and extract content from a vast range of web sources from around the world. Categorization then identifies and creates relationships between companies and among business topics creating an ecosystem – a holistic approach to company research and monitoring. This allows FirstRain to provide comparative and meaningful analytics by highlighting trends and relationships from qualitative data.
“Our partnership with FirstRain significantly improves the qualitative intelligence we are able to provide by identifying content from a broad range of sources,” said John Pedernales, Mergent’s Executive Managing Director and Director of Equity Research. “Integrating results from FirstRain into our platform for academic, corporate, public and government libraries allows our clients to have a richer, more complete research experience. The business relevant content delivered by FirstRain complements our offering and empowers our clients to quickly and efficiently find information that is most relevant to their research.”
“We are delighted to have been selected by Mergent to power the business news capabilities on the Mergent Online platform,” said Penny Herscher, President and CEO of FirstRain. “This partnership takes advantage of FirstRain’s unique ability to deliver quality, new and interesting – and highly categorized – web information that provides value to users doing qualitative research in any information platform.”
Last month’s announcement by Newssift (part of the Financial Times Group) of its meaning-based vertical search engine was an important new way to look at search for business professionals – you can quickly see how it’s different if you try it at www.newssift.com.
This morning, Newssift and FirstRain announced that FirstRain’s technology provides the business-relevant content: news, blogs, and other original, authoritative pieces of web content that Newssift consumes. We drive business content into the Newssift search application – here is the press release.
Why does this matter to Newssift? Well at the heart is the quest for quality of search results. If you’ve ever tried to use Google for business research you know how nearly impossible it is. You just get too many old and junky results back so you can’t sort the good from the bad – and so you can’t solve your research problem. In contrast, FirstRain has built its name providing highly relevant finance and market research information, extracted and analyzed from the web, to professional investors and corporate users. This matters because some of the smartest people in the world manage money. They run hedge funds, they manage billions of dollars of assets in mutual funds and pension funds – and they have a lower tolerance for junk or irrelevant data than any other group of users in the world. They have driven us to produce only the highest level of quality of research from the web.
As a result of our user’s demands, we’ve built considerable expertise in the quality of the content coming in which we are now making available to Newssift. The quality and classification of the sources, sorting out useful and authoritative blogs from junky promotional ones. Sorting out the highest quality journalism sources from countries all over the world. And now that content is flowing into Newssift so if you use Newssift you’re getting access to the first stage of the FirstRain advantage.
Newssift has led the way, and other media leaders now have a template. We read daily of publishers of every stripe struggling to build and retain their online audience. Whether it’s a technology trade journal, a leading voice of the blogosphere, an investing website, or a major metro newspaper, new tools are coming up to make the web useful for business research in the new generation of publishing that’s emerging. And Newssift won’t be the last.
Exciting times ahead.
We’ve expanded our coverage today to include a number of topics our customers have been requesting to help them with their fixed income investing.
There are two major new areas covered
- Municipal bonds – this includes adding research on the bonds themselves, government infrastructure plans which are critical for modeling the risk on the bonds, municipal budget activity and job and employment trends – all tagged by state so you can just see research for the states you are interested in. In addition, we already have significant real estate coverage and so we’re tying that into the real estate impact on the tax base. More later – but we’ve introduced FirstRain content widgets onto http://ignite.firstrain.com/ for the first time and you can see samples of the type of data we’re finding in the Municipal Credit Crisis box.
- Corporate debt – this includes our usual coverage of companies and markets, but now extended to include the topics that would impact the risk of the bonds and convertible securities.
The second area is a new trend for many traditional equity investors. They wouldn’t have invested in corporate debt in the past but there is a new combination of events making it compelling. We have a number of hedge fund clients who look at the volatility of the equities markets and then compare them to the relative security – and significant rates of return like 15%+ available on some converts. Given that comparison – 15% from a senior convertible note or a crap shoot investing in the stock they understandably want to get research to help them decide on the risk profile of the convert. (If you are a Cadence employee/investor the Cadence converts are good examples of this trade off).
So if you have interest in the fixed income market and what original research is coming from the web check out the new FirstRain web site or read the press release here.
There are good days and bad days running a small company, and then there are great days that make it all worth while. I received the following email from a customer today about one of our support guys – this is what we aspire to for every customer!
Hi Penny – I hope you are doing well. I have been a customer of FirstRain, for the past several months. I just wanted to drop a line and let you know what an excellent job your team is doing. In particular, C*** has been extremely helpful in setting me up and working with me on some sophisticated searches. As someone who deals with a multitude of vendors, I am exposed to a wide range of customer service – I must say that C*** is at the top of my list. His is extremely responsive, very professional and, most of all, effective. Thank you again for your help and I look forward to a strong relationship with you and C*** moving forward.
Very best,
T***
FirstRain announced two great pieces of momentum this morning: CalSTRS has become a client of FirstRain, and we’ve released new capability in our system to support pension governance.
I am proud to have CalSTRS as a client. Their reputation for rigor and integrity is unmatched – and deserved. They and the South Dakota Investment Council are our first two disclosable pension clients, and we’re seeing intense interest from pension funds globally as the pace of regulatory actions and change increases and shareholders sharpen their attention.
Pension governance is a specific set of requirements for pension funds. It involves automated monitoring and analysis of:
- Traditional corporate governance, which includes by-laws changes, anti-takeover provisions, executive compensation,, and board independence
- Rule-making processes at the government, financial exchange and global regulators
- Opinions, actions and statements of peer institutions, activist investors, and other global market participants
- Environmental & Social Responsibility trends, rules, and risk analysis
This is a timely introduction, as investment officers are under significant pressure to reduce governance risk in a systematic and repeatable way. The automated governance analysis process using FirstRain is a step in the right direction.
Today is an important day for FirstRain – we’re announcing a major partnership with FactSet Research Systems. There is a rapidly growing awareness of the importance of the web in financial research and we are thrilled that FactSet has selected FirstRain to be its partner on providing web data into their process. We are proud to work with such a highly-acclaimed market leader.
To put it in today’s context, as the market swings with unprecedented volatility, our customers on the buyside need complete information more than ever and cannot carry the risk of missing critical information about their investments. As Clint Anderson at Meritage Portfolio Management says:
“Prices react rapidly to new marketplace information, so it’s important to have as much of that information as possible. FirstRain consolidates hard-to-find data from the web on our portfolios, sectors, and industries. Integrating FirstRain with the analysis I do in FactSet provides a more complete picture of the market.”
For users who are customers for both Factset and FirstRain this will mean a more seamless research process. The FirstRain platform in now integrated into Marquee allowing a user to move from a Marquee view of a stock straight into a FirstRain view of the stock – and effectively adding the web as a new dataset into the Factset platform.
For FactSet users who are not yet FirstRain clients, we will offer a sample snapshot of company data and the ability to request up to 5 company tearsheets showing the FirstRain web view of the company.
FactSet is the second top tier financial platform to add web research capabilities into its platform, and the second to select FirstRain to do so – Capital IQ was the first.
As I have been talking with our clients these past few weeks, it’s obvious that the shakeout we’re chronicling in our free report: Eye On The Storm is certainly not over, but I’m hearing their confidence that, while this will be an ugly downturn, it is not the end of the world as we know it. And managing money hasn’t fundamentally changed. Investors still need high quality and complete information to make decisions from and both the web and FirstRain are seen more and more necessary components of the research process.
